Cowardice and Betrayal by the Elders leaves the Youth Unprotected.
Less than a week after former civil rights, “heroes” gathered in Selma, Alabama, for the 55th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday. The brutal State-sanctioned violence against protesters marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the right of black citizens to vote. Another State-sanctioned act of brutality fell up on Nathaniel Woods.
Convicted in the 2004 murders of three Birmingham police officers, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. His co-defendant Kerry Spencer was adamant that Woods had nothing to do with the murders, and he (Spencer) alone pulled the trigger and was responsible. The Jury themselves were not unanimous on their decision to sentence woods to die. The sister of one of the slain officers, Kimberly Chisholm Simmons, also didn’t support his death sentence and attempted to contact Govoner Kay Ivey for a Stay of Execution.
By all accounts, this was a modern-day legal lynching, held in the same State where the business would close, and families would gather and have picnics to watch a Black man lynched less than a century ago. Many Black millennials are posting and tweeting, wondering how this could be possible in the 21st century. The answer to that is as simple as it is scandalous.
A generation of Black “leaders” choose a life of comfort and wealth for themselves in exchange for the bodies and blood of the youth. They chose “integration” and “equality” over aggregation and empowerment. They bartered security and self-determination for precariousness and a pat on the head from the dominant society. In every shape, form and facet, they have failed us.
From John Lewis to Jesse Jackson, Jim Clyburn, Bobby Rush, Al Sharpton to Stacey Abrams. Each -and countless more- have failed to build institutions and apparatuses to protect us. Often, we, as the young generation, make light of their misgivings, referring to them as “Butter Biscuits Eating Negros.” However, we have to be clear that their betrayal and cowardice is not funny. What they’ve done, what they have failed to do, makes them as culpable and have just as much blood on their hands as Governor Ivey and Attorney General Marshall.